Mushoku Tensei (LN) - Volume 24 - Chapter 7

Chapter 7:

The Genius

FIRST, Cliff hurried to the patients’ bedsides.

“Looking at the patients’ condition is the most basic of the basics,” he said as he went through examining each one of them. 

He wasn’t doing much different from what the medical team had done, which worried me. He used the Demon Eye to look at the people with severe symptoms, talked to the ones with mild symptoms, and cross-referenced with the charts the medical team had made.

“Like I’d talk to a Millis…ackh, ackh!”

Some of the patients looked scared when they saw Cliff’s clothes, some were outright hostile. The most intense persecution faced by the Superd had come from the Millis Church. They remembered that.

“Forget that and answer. When did you first feel something was wrong?”

Cliff wasn’t worried about it in the slightest, even though none of them would cooperate with him. If it were me, I’d have despaired halfway through. That was Cliff for you.

“I see…” Cliff said. After he’d gone around all the patients, he acted like something had fallen into place for him. I was pretty sure he still didn’t understand a thing yet. Cliff might be a genius, but there are limits to anyone’s understanding…I think. Cliff might be a priest, a healing magician, and a researcher, but he still wasn’t a doctor.

“I’ll talk to the doctors in charge next,” he said, then went to interrogate the medical team. He asked the two doctors from Asura how they’d examined the patients and what they planned on doing next.

“We’re going to use detoxification magic in conjunction with medicine and see how things go.”

“So much for the doctors of the Asura Kingdom, huh?” Cliff said, snorting. The doctor and I stared at him in disbelief. Such arrogance…! Maybe the Superd’s reaction to him was getting under his skin. Had he just always been like this?

“If that were enough to find a cure, Rudeus or Orsted would have cured them long ago.”

“Then what do you suggest, Master Cliff?”

“That’s what I’m going to investigate now,” he replied. The doctor scowled. Whoa there, Mister Doctor, settle down. If it all goes wrong, blame him all you like then. Right now, let’s just settle down.

I was uneasy, though. He’d seemed so reliable earlier, but was he? Norn seemed unsure as well. She glanced anxiously at us from where she sat nursing Ruijerd across the room.

“All right, then. Rudeus, let’s go outside,” Cliff said. We left the doctors and went out of the hall.

Cliff stopped just after we left the hall to go over our results.

“I learned one thing. I talked to an elder and even that guy said the Superd Tribe has never had this sickness before.”

“Never? How old is the elder?”

“Over a thousand years old.”

Superd folks lived for a really long time…

“They were infected after coming to this land. My conclusion is that the source of the disease is in the land itself.”

“Is it possible the Man-God brought in poison?”

“It’s not that. My eye would see that sort of thing,” Cliff said, tapping his temple on the side of the eyepatch. We set off around the village. Our first stop was the field. Cliff took off his eyepatch and went through the area, checking every vegetable growing there. Some he broke open to look at their insides. He cracked open a juicy tomato right there in front of me.

If the world knew that the Superd engaged in ordinary agriculture, that might improve their reputation a little. After all, humans feel kinship with creatures that do the same things we do. 

“Next,” Cliff said. We went to the place where they butchered the beasts. There were a few bloodstains, but otherwise it was spick-and-span. A few villagers had collapsed in the middle of butchering an animal, but it was obviously dangerous to leave raw meat lying around, so Chandle had given instructions for it to be disposed of outside the village.

Cliff used the Eye of Identification to look carefully at a knife and something like a chopping board.

“I see…” he said to himself. “Rudeus, do you know where the meat they cut up here is stored?”

“Um… This way.” I didn’t see, but I showed him to the provision store. It was partly underground and stocked full of large quantities of dried meat, salted meat, and vegetables suited for storage. Cliff appraised all of it with the Eye of Identification. 

“Did…did you learn anything?” I asked.

“Don’t rush. I need to look through all of it first.” We left the provision store, and Cliff started going through each of the houses in the village. He went inside, rummaging through the kitchens and bedrooms and even their spare clothes. This was a huge overstep. If I did the same thing in someone’s house everyone would shun me, but of course, Cliff was a hero.

One thing seeing the Superd houses showed me was just how sparse Ruijerd’s house was. The others had flowers, or children’s drawings scrawled on the pillars… You could feel their liveliness and smell the smells of everyday life. These little outfits must be for a child. Of course, when the residents had mild symptoms and were home, we got permission.

“The Millis Church…!”

“M-Mom…”

“It’s okay. Please calm down, he’s safe.”

One person saw Cliff in his priest’s robes and started threatening him with a spear, but that didn’t hinder us from getting permission.

“Lies! The Millis Church took one look at us and…ah…agggh…”

“Mom? Mom?!” The mother trembled as though she were reliving some memory. Her daughter looked like she might cry as she clung to her mother.

I sensed the unbridgeable gap between the Superd and the Millis Church. To Cliff and me, the persecution of the Superd was ancient history. To the victims here in this village, their memories were still raw.

“Now, what kind of things do you usually eat? How do you cook it?”

Cliff didn’t read the room. He repeated his question like he didn’t even see how terrified the mother and her trembling child were. “Answer me, quickly. We don’t have much time.”

He kept asking until they answered.

“Hmm.” Cliff went through all the houses in the same way. I don’t think he found anything decisive. It was more instructive about the Superd culture than anything else.

“Um, Cliff?” 

“There’s nothing to worry about, Rudeus. They weren’t afraid of me, they were just afraid of the robes. If I cure this disease while wearing the robes, it’ll change their minds. Right?”

Would it be that simple? I wondered. The little girl from before might change her thinking, at least. I hoped it was that easy. 

“Right, next,” Cliff said. We went around each location in the village. The spring in the center, the well, the storehouse, the materials shed, and finally the trash heap outside the village.

Cliff looked over each of them with painstaking exactitude. His face was grave as he rummaged through the trash heap and picked through the rotten beast meat. Who knew what the Eye of Identification was showing him? All I could do was answer his questions. We looked over the whole village until the sun had fully set, then we went back to the hall.

“So what do you think, Cliff?”

“I have some thoughts.”

“Yeah?”

“Lise, bring me my medicine kit!” Cliff shouted across the hall repurposed as a medical center. Elinalise, who was nursing the patients, immediately stood up and came running. She grabbed the large backpack placed in a corner of the medical center, then returned to us.

“Yes siree!” she said.

“Thanks, Lise.”

Elinalise looked happy. Maybe it was because it’d been so long since she’d last seen Cliff. Their children… She might have left them at my place?

“Listening, Rudeus?” Cliff said. “The infections follow a set course.”

“Oh?”

“Having said that, I’m not a doctor, so I can’t be any more specific. The Superd first contracted the disease when they came to this land. That’s why I inspected the food they were growing here with the Eye of Identification.”

“Okay, and?” I prompted eagerly.

“I found no abnormalities.”

What…?

“I didn’t detect anything lurking in the earth or the water.”

“The Eye of Identification tells you all that?”

“Yes. We can trust their food, at least.”

So the food was all clear. That was Kishirika’s Demon Eye for you. It’d instantly pick up any food that would give you food poisoning or worse.

“Only, they all display like this,” Cliff said, then recited, “A tasty-lookin’ tomato packed full of highly concentrated mana.”

Apparently, the Eye of Identification used colloquial language.

“It’s not just the vegetables. It’s the soil and the water too. They’re all packed with extremely highly concentrated mana.

“It’s come back with ‘packed with highly concentrated mana’ in Millis before too. But it’s very rare, and never for the soil or the water.”

Concentrated mana, huh? Come to think of it, Aisha had said that the rice she planted in soil I made grew well. Maybe that was because of the highly concentrated mana.

“What does that mean?”

“I have a question for you. Was there much agriculture on the Demon Continent?”

“I don’t know how the Superd lived on the Demon Continent, but I hardly saw any vegetables there. There aren’t none, but there aren’t many varieties. Meat is the staple.”

“Just as I thought,” Cliff said. He raised a finger, then started to explain his hypothesis. “When you plant vegetables in mana-rich soil, the produce you grow will also be mana-rich. But there are a lot of different kinds of soil. I imagine the soil on the Demon Continent is just as mana-rich but has no nutrients. Vegetables won’t grow there.

“We don’t see this kind of disease in the Great Forest, so this forest must be special. The soil here is extremely high in nutrients and bursting with mana, just like the water. The result is mana-rich plants. There being only one species of monster here may be related, but the root cause isn’t important right now.

“The thing is, under normal circumstances, none of this should be an issue. We go about our daily lives without thinking about things like this. If it’s related, we should see similar cases cropping up all over the place. Under normal circumstances, we’re able to cleanly expel the mana we take in. The Superd shouldn’t be too different.

“What happens, though, if you continuously take it in? Not for ten or twenty years, but a hundred, two hundred years of ingesting highly concentrated mana? What then?

“Despite the plague’s virulence, adults make up most of the infected. The children are fine.” At this point in the explanation, Cliff turned to look at me. 

It was true, there were a lot of healthy children for a plague. With the Superd it was hard to tell who the elderly were, but I guessed that meant it wasn’t a problem of immunity.

“And I’m sure we know what happens when mana is taken into the body and not fully expelled.”

What happens when mana isn’t fully expelled… He means Nanahoshi!

“So is this Dryne Syndrome?” I asked. He might be on to something. The early symptoms looked like a cold, and the patients became bedridden as the illness became acute. Wouldn’t Orsted have caught it, too? Maybe not. Dryne Syndrome was an old disease, so Orsted might not know the cure—he might not even know the name. Right, if no one crucial got sick in the loop, Orsted had no way to know about it. He couldn’t go ask Kishirika about it, like I’d done.

“But there are a lot of differences,” I pointed out. “Not enough time has passed since Ruijerd came to this village.”

“That’s true…” Cliff acknowledged. “But Abyssal King Vita’s main body was possessing him, right? That might be why. Regardless, surely it’s worth considering.” Cliff pulled a box out of the backpack. Inside, it was stuffed full of a variety of leaves and seeds. He took one out. It was dried, but I recognized it as Sokas Grass.

“I got hold of some just in case something like this happened,” he said.

Cliff had come prepared.

“We’ll also use this.” He fished a red berry out of a corner of the box.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It forms the base of a poison that blocks the mana in your body.”

“It’s…a poison?”

“Well, I say poison, but its only effect is to stop a magician who imbibes it from using magic.”

If I took that it’d literally be lethal… Could I really give the Superd something like that?

“According to the Eye of Identification, it was taken together with Sokas Tea long ago. The Eye says, It enhances the effect of Sokas Grass and goes well with tea, creating a pleasant sense of intoxication.”

In other words, Kishirika didn’t see it as poison. 

“The problem is,” Cliff went on, “I don’t know what will happen if I give it to the Superd now. If my hypothesis is correct, this will cure them. But it could also have the opposite effect.”

I felt sure it’d be okay…but if it made the plague any worse, people could die. There was no guarantee.

After a moment’s silence, Cliff said, “Oh, well. Overthinking it won’t help. Let’s ask.” Full of determination, he turned to the medical center and shouted, “I have a medicine I want to try for your sickness! Is anyone here willing to take it?”

“Wha—! Just a—! Cliff!” I spluttered.

The medical center went dead silent. They looked at Cliff, then at his clothes. Some turned pale, others averted their eyes. 

“I only need one of you!” he said. “There’s no guarantee it will cure you!”

He didn’t need everyone to take it just to see the effect. One person would do. No one volunteered.

“The Millis Church can’t be trusted,” someone said, breaking the silence. It was one of the men who’d been at the meeting with the chief. We were never going to win over the room at this rate. But what were we supposed to do? We couldn’t force the medicine down their throats.

Then, someone raised his hand. “I’ll…take it…” he rasped. He sat up unsteadily, his piercing eyes on us. Beside him, supporting him, was Norn.

“Ruijerd! You’re awake?”

“Um, yes.” It was Norn who answered. “He opened his eyes just now, Rudeus…” But then other voices broke out around her, drowning her out.

“Ruijerd, you’d trust a man from the Millis Church?”

“They chased us around the world after the war!” The most virulent anger was from the younger Superd. This seemed to draw in the medical team, who began to protest as well.

“You want to give them some totally unknown substance? I’ve never heard anything like it!” one said.

“Did you even study medicine properly?!” demanded the other. The doctors’ fears propagated through the room as the Superd who’d kept silent up until now began to mutter. 

An unknown medicine. And what’s more, it had been brought to them by a man clad in the robes of the Millis Church. Everyone was confused. Some dithered anxiously, others were openly outraged. 

“Do you want us to go extinct?!” Ruijerd roared, and the medical center fell silent again. The mutterers shut up, faces pale. The ones who’d been uneasy looked down as well. 

Ruijerd broke out into violent coughing, while Norn stroked his back. When it passed, he said softly, “Rudeus brought that man here, and I trust Rudeus. If you have complaints, save them until after I’m dead…” 

It spoke volumes to Ruijerd Superdia’s importance in this village that not one person argued with him.

“Okay then, Ruijerd. You’ll take the medicine. I’ll tell you in advance: there’s a chance it’ll make you worse. You might die.”

“That’s fine. I’ve lived a good life. I can die without regret.”

What about my regrets? This isn’t for the Superd Tribe. It’s for you, Ruijerd. See? Look at the face Norn is making. She agrees.

The room went silent again until another man raised his hand. “If Ruijerd is taking it, I’ll take it too.” He was young, with comparatively mild symptoms. Actually, for all I knew he was an old man. “Ruijerd saved me on the Demon Continent. I would have died back then. Nothing can scare me after that.”

This opened the floodgates. Hands went up with more and more people saying, “Me too.”

In the end, even the village elder raised his hand. “The Millis Church can’t be trusted, but Ruijerd is our champion. Whatever our champion decides, I’ll follow.” He turned to us and said softly, “Young churchman, I am sorry for my discourtesy earlier. Please, save our village.”

Cliff gave a determined nod.

***

After taking the red berries with the Sokas Tea, Ruijerd and the others fell asleep. They didn’t drop dead the moment they took it, at least.

We’d know the results tomorrow…apparently. I obviously didn’t expect the Sokas Tea to solve everything, but I wanted them to improve, if even by a little. Right now, though, the sun had set. I decided to call it a day. I stayed at Ruijerd’s house. For some reason my feet naturally led me back there. Ruijerd hadn’t given me his permission to sleep at his place, but it was where I wanted to stay.

“…”

I could tell Norn wanted to stay at Ruijerd’s bedside, but she couldn’t do anything while he was asleep, so she came with me. 

Norn and I were sitting by the fire. We didn’t speak. There were only two sounds: the crackling of the burning logs and the bubbling of the simmering water in the pot in the back of the hearth. Potatoes and meat brought by the medical team simmered away. Cliff said it was probably fine, but as you might imagine, I wasn’t keen on eating food that might be poisoning everyone.

“Rudeus, Ruijerd is going to get better, right?” asked Norn suddenly. She must’ve been worried. I was worried.

“Yeah, he will.”

“Really?”

“I’ve never known Cliff to fail once he’s set his mind to something. He might not be able to do it tomorrow, but he’ll cure them in the end.”

“Will Ruijerd still be alive by then?”

“Don’t worry. You might know about Ruijerd from the Laplace War. He survived even though he was surrounded by over a thousand soldiers. He’s not going to die in a place like this.”

I couldn’t bring myself to say more.

“I’m worried…” Norn hugged her knees and buried her face in them. The mood was dark.

The stew needed to simmer for a little longer. It wasn’t crucial that I lighten the atmosphere or anything, but feeling depressed wasn’t helping.

All there was left to do for the day was eat and go to bed. I wanted to relax so we could at least get some food down and get a good night’s sleep.

“By the way, Norn, is school all right with this?” I asked. 

Norn looked up so that just half her face was visible. “…I already graduated,” she said.

“About that, I wanted…um, I’m sorry I couldn’t be there.”

I’d missed it. No one had told me. Now I thought about it, Sylphie’d had the baby…yeah, it was already graduation season.

Roxy could have told me, at least… No, okay, if she’d reminded me and I couldn’t go, it would’ve just weighed on me.

“You didn’t have to come. It’s fine,” Norn said.

I wasn’t having that—this was Norn’s graduation ceremony! How could I have missed such an important event? What was I supposed to tell Paul up in heaven?

“I wasn’t even top of my class…”

“But you were student council president. You must have made a speech, at least.” 

“I did the opening address, but I got tongue-tied in the middle. I almost tripped when I left the stage. It was awful.”

I could see it now. Norn faltering during her speech, panicking internally as she tried to smooth it over, then trying to at least make a clean getaway but missing the step—somehow managing to keep her footing. I wished I’d seen it. Norn looked disgusted, but I wished I could’ve taken a video to put on Paul’s grave as an offering.

“By the way, you said there was some kind of event before your graduation, right? What did you end up doing?”

“The year Cliff graduated you dueled a whole lot of people, right? We copied you and held a combat tournament.”

“A combat tournament! That sounds great. Wasn’t it dangerous?”

“We tried to minimize the risk as much as possible. The rules said no killing, and we borrowed the school’s Saint-tier healing magic circle and had a healing magician nearby. The teachers made plenty of healing magic scrolls for us. We also had all the participants sign a pledge. There were some injuries, but no deaths.”

That was impressive. At the level of graduating students at the University of Magic, both competitors would be able to use lethal magic. No deaths under those conditions? Luck probably came into it as well, but zero deaths was down to the solid system they set up.

“I wish I’d been there too.”

“It would have looked like child’s play next to your skills.”

“But a tournament! That’s always exciting.”

When I was a shut-in in my previous life, I’d taken part in a few online game tournaments. Sadly, I never achieved much, but with that caliber of participant, it was a rush just watching.

“By the way, did you have a trophy or something?”

“…We…did,” Norn said, then pouted. “Everyone on the student council put money in and we got a bouquet, a certificate, and a magic staff.”

It would’ve depended on the rank of the magic staff how expensive the whole prize package was, but it sounded like they’d splashed out with their limited budget. 

“The moment Rimi saw the competitors were mostly boys, she announced, ‘The victor gets a passionate kiss from President Norn!’”

“What?!”

“Everyone was so excited. I wanted to back out, but I couldn’t.”

What the hell? A tournament to win a kiss from Norn? You couldn’t do that. It was evil. Outrageous. If I’d been there, I’d have put on a mask, competed in the tournament, and kicked all their little… Strike that. That was a bit of an overreaction.

“And so…did you do it?”

There was a long pause. “On the cheek.”

Well, that wasn’t so dangerous after all. Norn had turned scarlet and buried her face in her knees, moaning with embarrassment. I guess to her it’d been a lot. After a little while, she flopped down onto the floor.

“They said I’ll remember the winner my whole life… I wish I could forget it already.”

“Yeah? What’s his name? Give me his address and phone number. A mysterious masked magician might just wipe him off the face of the earth, along with all memory he was ever born.”

“What’s a phone?”

“Never mind.” 

Norn sat up, then sat herself back on the floor. This time she folded her legs to her side instead of hugging her knees.

“Anyway, it sounds like the tournament was a great success.”

“I don’t know. I thought we did well, but there were lots of bad parts… It feels like I messed everything up.”

“That is what we call a great success,” I told her. “I’m glad.”

Norn went a little pink, but she nodded. “Thanks,” she said. Her expression had brightened just a little.

“Right, the potatoes should be ready soon. Want some, Norn?”

“Yes, please.” I spooned meat and potatoes into a bowl and handed it to her, then served myself. I hadn’t eaten anything all day, and I felt like I was about to starve to death. Norn stared into the contents of her bowl, then started to eat. After a while, she piped up again. “Big Brother?”

“Hm?”

“Thank you so much.”

“No worries.”

“But this tastes terrible.”

Sorry about that.

The next day, Norn and I set off at sunrise for the medical center in the hall.

My head was full of worry for Ruijerd. Thanks to the disgusting potato soup filling my belly, I’d at least gotten a good night’s sleep. Even if things didn’t go well, I had the stamina in reserve to nurse the sick. Bracing myself for a terrible scene, I opened the door to the medical center and gasped.

I was greeted by lively activity. Last night the medical center had felt like a wake, but now it buzzed with energy. Okay, that was overstating it. There wasn’t that much vigor. But everyone looked way perkier than they had yesterday. 

“Master Rudeus!” called one of the doctors. He saw me and came running. “Look at everyone! Look how they’ve improved!”

It was working. The Sokas Tea was working.

“Last night, everyone who drank the medicinal infusion all suddenly said they needed to defecate. The nurses escorted them to the outhouse. They all presented with light blue diarrhea. A little while after it passed, they began to rapidly improve. Those who had severe cases still can’t stand, but I’m sure they’ll be up before long!”

Poop talk first thing in the morning… Wait, what was that about light blue diarrhea?

“We’re in the process of administering it to everyone, adjusting the infusion as we go. Wow, were we idiots to doubt him! I mean, this is genius stuff. Cliff Grimor, breaker of curses! Oh, gosh, I can’t hang around here. I’ve still got work to do. I’d better be off!” After this one-sided announcement, the doctor ran off back to the patients. 

I didn’t remember mentioning any curse-breaking. I guess that was how Cliff introduced himself.

Anyway, light blue diarrhea? That reminded me of something. What was it? Light blue… Light blue…

“Rudeus.” I realized a large shadowy figure was standing in front of me. A man dressed in white with a black helmet.

“Oh, Sir Orsted.”

“Did you see their excrement?”

“Uh, not yet.”

Orsted bent down a little to whisper in my ear. “Those were the dead offshoots of Abyssal King Vita.”

Abyssal King Vita. That name conjured up an odd thought. What if—only what if, mind you—the plague wasn’t Dryne syndrome?

Abyssal King Vita had spread his offshoots throughout the village, and in doing so, he had stalled the progress of the disease. I’d thought that Vita was just numbing them to the symptoms while leaving the plague unchecked… What if Vita had cured the plague long ago? Then he’d used his offshoots to make the villagers sick, just to scare them. When he died, he summoned the last of his power to make the offshoots keep working their poison. The red berries and Sokas Tea had broken them down in the patients’ intestines or wherever they’d been lodged and flushed them out… Maybe. I mean, that was all just conjecture.

“We simply had to be persistent. Just like you said.”

“Just like I said,” I replied.

Well, whatever. For now, the crisis was over. Abyssal King Vita had been defeated completely. That’s how I was going to look at it.

“What’s Cliff doing?”

“He was up all night observing the patients, but he fell asleep around dawn. He’ll be in the empty house nearby with Elinalise Dragonroad.”

You don’t say? Cliff really gave everything he had. Let’s leave him to rest up. Even if he was bound to get straight to work on kid number two with Elinalese when he woke up, he’d need that energy.

“Ruijerd Superdia just woke up too,” Orsted went on.

“Really?!”

“He did. You should go and see him.”

“You’ll excuse me!” I bowed, then headed for the back of the medical center, making a beeline for where Ruijerd had slept yesterday. There he was. He was sitting up in bed, his color was good, and he was eating.

“Ruijerd!” Norn ran over and hugged him around the middle the moment we reached him. “Thank goodness… Oh, I’m so glad…” She was weeping. Norn was such a crybaby. Ruijerd looked baffled, but he wiped his mouth, put his bowl of food down to one side, and stroked Norn’s head. I just watched them for a while, not saying anything. I felt a bit like crying too.

After a time, Ruijerd looked up and said, “Rudeus.”

“Ruijerd, you’re… Are you better now?”

“Yes. I can’t swing a spear yet, but I am better.”

All right. Thank goodness… I’m so glad… I wasn’t mimicking Norn—that was all I could think.

“I am indebted to you again.”

“Don’t mention it. Besides, we don’t know that you’re fully cured yet. Don’t get complacent.”

“Indeed.”

When Ruijerd and I started talking, Norn detached herself from Ruijerd’s waist, sniffling, then covered her face with her hands and began to hiccup. She was blushing scarlet right to the tips of her ears.

“But I have something to say first, Rudeus,” Ruijerd went on.

“What is it?” He looked serious in a way that made me a little anxious. Was there something else? Was the shocking truth about to be revealed now, at this moment? I braced myself.

“When I’m fully recovered, I will help you.”

I was speechless. What was this sensation I felt welling up in my chest? Ruijerd and I were going to work together again. Was this…elation?

Yeah. I was happy. Plain happy.

“Thank you, I…I’ll be glad to have you beside me.” I gulped down whatever was rising in my throat and suppressed the tears welling in my eyes. I held out a hand to him.

“I’ll be glad to be there,” Ruijerd said, taking my hand. His grip was warm and strong.